To Love and to Cherish (22 page)

He couldn’t take his eyes off the image in the mirror behind her, of his two hands sliding slowly up and down her long, slender spine. How could skin feel this soft? Be this white? He cupped the nape of her neck, tilting her head back to kiss her, letting his other hand drift down to her soft breast. “Anne, do you know how beautiful you are?” She didn’t answer, but her eyes said,
Tell me
. But he didn’t have the words. “I’ll paint you one day,” he promised. “Then you’ll know.”

They kissed again. She took a deep, ragged breath. “Now you. I’m longing to see you.”

He took off his clothes. She watched him, entranced, frozen in place. Self-consciousness slowed him down. His body was just his body; he was thankful that it was strong and healthy, but otherwise he didn’t think of it. He hoped it pleased her.

“Oh, God.”

There was no tone to her voice, so he had no idea what that meant. What was she feeling behind that hot-eyed stare? “I won’t hurt you,” he assured her—inanely.

She made a sound, possibly a laugh, and came out of her trance. “Oh, Christy,” she whispered, “I’m so—I’m shaking, I’m so excited. Oh, hurry, let’s get in bed.”

He laughed with relief. They climbed into the bed in which he’d always slept alone, the bed in which his father and mother had conceived him. Was it blasphemous to think that the slow slide of his hands over Anne’s bare skin was heaven? If so, he couldn’t help it. He was only a man, and this was the sweetest human thing he’d ever experienced. Her silky breasts were heavy and full against his chest; it was as natural as breathing to put his mouth on her nipples and gently suckle her. They clutched each other, head to toe, their bodies’ perspiration making a lovely slickness. He felt the soft brush of her pubic hair against his stomach, and his head swam. He ran his hands down her long flanks, squeezing her buttocks, trying to get her, capture her, understand her body all at once.

Impossible. He made himself slow down, concentrating on her sleek belly, touching and tasting, and now one satin-skinned thigh, perfect, perfect.

She’d lost her breath—she was losing her mind. “Hurry,” she said again; “I want—oh, I want—” She wanted to know
everything
, find out
now
. She touched him without gentleness, whispering her urgency in his ear, firing him, taking them both higher. But he would not be rushed. He was on a different journey, and his slower pace only magnified her desire. Deep, drugging kisses; slow, shattering caresses; and words—she could’ve swooned from the things he said to her, the singing sound of passion in his voice.
This is real
, she chanted to herself.
Christy would never lie, and this is happening. I am loved, and this is happening
.

At last, at last, he came into her. She enfolded him, and they sighed together, sharing the relief and the deep wonder. Lying still, she felt the strong beat of his pulse inside her body. “I love you,” they said at the same moment. And she said, “This can’t be wrong,” and she was weeping; she felt torn out of herself, born all over again. “Oh, Christy, you know it can’t.”

He kissed her mouth, moving in her, putting an end to talk. Nothing now but the wild, tender endearments and the gasping sighs, raw, helpless groans, the music of passion, graceless, unrehearsed, heartfelt. Human love, nothing divine. The peak rose up fast, she could feel it, almost
see
it, rolling in on itself, nearer, closer, the ultimate wave in her turbulent sea. She wanted it to take both of them, both together, so she told him it was coming. She clung to him, her lifeline, her mate, “Christy!”—until it swamped her.

Lovely, oh, lovely, the sweetest drowning, the endless immersion. She stopped being herself and turned into the sea, and Christy did too, and it was all one, all vast liquid pleasure, rolling and breaking, a rough, sweet churning. From a deep, fathomless distance she heard him say, “Oh,
God
, oh,
God
,” on weary, spent breaths. Her mind came back to her gradually, in pieces. When it finally reassembled, she thought it highly likely that he meant it literally—that he was praying.

XVI

C
HRISTY HAD HAIR
all over his body. Fine pale blond hair, soft as a baby’s, lightly fleecing his arms, his chest, his long, handsome legs. The only hairless places Anne could see, after a meticulous survey, were his belly and his buttocks. And the tops of his shoulders. And those soft places on his inner arms, where she liked to kiss him.

I wish summer would come
. The thought came to her out of the blue as she sat on her heels, naked in Christy’s bed, gazing down at him as he slept. She had a bright, vivid picture of him, naked, lying in a sunny, grassy meadow. She saw herself kneeling above him—as she was now—sprinkling him with flowers. Adorning him. Decorating him with buttercups and daisies, marsh violets and forget-me-nots. She’d make a crown of clover and plait it in his hair. Stick foxgloves and scarlet pimpernel between his toes. A little wreath of speedwell for his navel. And for his cock, something most special . . . Ah, she had it. Of course. Hearts-ease.

A yawn overtook her soft smile. Lying down beside him, she covered his golden body with the quilt and snuggled close, sighing with contentment. A minute later she was fast asleep, dreaming of flowers.

***

He’d only been gone a few minutes. He’d left her sound asleep, a warm, enticing mound huddled under a heap of bedclothes.

She was even more enticing now. The fire he’d rebuilt had warmed the room in his absence, and she’d thrown off all the covers. He crept closer on silent stocking feet. He set the tray he’d brought from the kitchen on the bedside table and eased down beside her, careful not to shake the mattress. She looked like a runner in profile, lying on her side, all her elbows and knees bent at different angles. A naked runner. He had an urge to stroke one finger down the long, graceful curve of her backbone—but he resisted, fearful of waking her; he wanted to look at her a little longer. Everything about her was beautiful to him, from her red-gold hair, vivid as a flame across the pillow, to the pink soles of her long, skinny feet. Candlelight flickered over her lily skin, gilding it, and he could feel its unearthly softness again even though he wasn’t touching her. One outflung arm coyly hid the tip of her breast, and her topmost thigh shielded the curly nest of her pubic hair. A discreet pose, classic in its way. If he were painting her, he would lessen the discretion. He’d leave the light exactly where it was but lift her left arm a half-inch higher, so the rose-colored nipple showed. Yes. And he might shift the angle of her bottom, paint it in three-quarter profile, because—well, just because. He smiled, and couldn’t resist trailing his fingers in a feather-soft circle around her left buttock. She didn’t stir. She had a cleft on either side of her spine, a subtle indentation just big enough for his thumb; he pressed it there, lightly. The toes on her right foot twitched. What an intriguing reflex. He tried it again, with the same result. He was looking around for other sites that might connect—her shoulder blade and her chin, who knew?—when she opened her eyes, turned her head, and saw him behind her. Her sleepy, instantaneous smile went straight to his heart.

“Oils,” he told her. “Definitely oils. Even sleeping, you’re too strong for watercolors.”

“What?” She put her hand inside his dressing gown and rubbed his chest.

“Will you let me paint you, Anne?”

She blinked up at him dreamily. “I presume you mean in the nude.”

“Of course.”

“Mmm. Won’t that get you excommunicated or something?”

“We won’t show it to the bishop.” He said it with a smile, but he wasn’t really ready to joke about the consequences of his relationship with Anne, morally or professionally.

“You can paint me if I can draw you,” she decided, rolling over. “I’m best with pen and ink, and I’ve got an idea for a nice pastoral pose. You and a lot of flowers.”

“All right.”

Her eyes twinkled—mischievously, he thought. She gave his lapel a tug, pulling him down so they could kiss. It was a soft, slow, comfortable kiss, the kind he imagined married people shared when they were in love. Delightful thought. How could he wait a year to marry her—maybe more? Terrible thought.

“I’m starving.”

She had a fondness for double entendre, he was learning; he studied her face, but apparently she meant this statement literally. “Good,” he said, “because I’ve brought you sustenance.”

She looked awed. “Do you have any flaws, Christy? Any at all?”

“You’ll find out when you taste what I made you.”

Roast pork on big pieces of bread, smeared with butter and grated horseradish; potatoes, mashed up in cream and reheated on the kitchen stove; a little salad made of the watercress that grew year-round along the banks of the Wyck; and an ancient bottle of Chambertin from his father’s tiny cellar—good or bad, they would find out together.

They ate it in bed, Anne wearing one of his shirts, and midway through she pronounced it all delicious, the best meal she’d ever eaten in her life.

“Does this mean I don’t have any flaws?” he wondered.

“None that I’ve been able to discover. But you must have some, everyone does, and I’m looking forward to ferreting them out. Over the next fifty years or so.” They kissed, in a sort of lips-toast, and went back to their feast, both smiling.

“I don’t make very much money,” Christy said presently. “I think of the rectory as my home because I was born and grew up here, but it really isn’t; it’s part of the income from the ecclesiastical benefice. It’ll pass to the next incumbent when I’m gone.”

“Well, then,” she said carelessly, “nobody can say I married you for your money.”

“No, but they might say I married you for yours.”

“Nonsense. No one who knows you could think that, Christy, not for a second.”

He didn’t answer. He thought people would think, and probably say, any number of things once their engagement became known. But there was no sense burdening her with that at this early stage.

“Anyway, I expect you’ll be a bishop in a few years,” she said airily, biting into one of the apples he’d brought for dessert.

“I will, will I?”

“A man with no flaws has got to rise, it’s a law of physics. How do you get to be a bishop, by the way?”

“The prime minister nominates you and the queen appoints you, subject to a formal election by the cathedral chapter.”

“Oh, Lord, I’m going to have to learn what all that means, aren’t I? Cathedral chapter, benefice, incumbent. Canons and deans. Advowsons.”

“Candlemas, Martinmas, Michaelmas,” he threw in. “Whitsuntide. Rogation Day.”

She slid down on her pillow in mock despair. “Exegesis, eschatology. Apostasy.”

“Saint Swithin’s Day.”

“Oh, no, you made that up.”

“Not a bit. July fifteenth. They say if it rains on Saint Swithin’s, it’ll rain for the next forty days.”

“Well, that I don’t doubt. And that’s another thing, Christy, I
hate
the winters here.”

He shook his head sadly. “Not much I can do about that.”

“No, but at least I want credit for the sacrifice I’m making.”

He set his empty plate down and rolled onto his side to face her. “I’ll give you credit. I’ll give you all the credit you know what to do with.” He reached across her to pull her closer. “I’ll keep you warm, too.”

“I wouldn’t doubt that, either,” she said breathlessly. Her mouth, when he kissed her, tasted of apple. She shimmied down lower in the bed until her head was off the pillow entirely, inviting him. Her hands coasting over his skin felt like warm flames. “What time is it?” she murmured, her voice sultry.

“Late.”

“How late?”

“Three, three-thirty.”

She smiled. “That’s early. Nothing stirs at the Hall in winter before six. We’ve got three whole hours.”

“Time enough for you to finish telling me your life story.”

“Pardon me?”

“The thrilling conclusion.”

“Now?”

“Unless you don’t want to.” He pulled a stray strand of hair out of her eyes and tucked it behind her ear. “You needn’t tell me. But I know something was wrong between you and Geoffrey, something worse than the trouble I’d expect between two people who didn’t suit and didn’t love each other. Something you won’t speak of.”

She broke their gazes to stare past his shoulder at the ceiling, and her eyes were cloudy with indecision. She sat up. She plumped her pillow and tidied the bedclothes over her legs, turning the quilt back and folding the top of the sheet over it in her lap, running her hands pointlessly across the wrinkle-free coverlet. “I was going to tell you,” she said at last. “I kept putting it off. It’s just—I guess I’d have chosen some other time, some other place. But I’ve been using that for an excuse not to tell you for too long, and this is probably as good a time as any.”

“It is so painful, then?”

“It’s . . . unsavory.” She turned to him earnestly. “But nothing can spoil
this
, can it, Christy?”

“No, nothing can spoil this.”

The trouble left her face; she smiled at him tenderly. “No,” she agreed. “So. Well, then, where did I leave off? I believe Geoffrey had just left me for the first time.”

“Anne, don’t—” He stopped.

“What?”

“Never mind. Go on. No, nothing, go ahead.” He’d been about to say,
Don’t use that terrible dry, brittle tone, because it hurts me to know how badly you were hurt
. But she had to tell it her way, and if it helped to put that sardonic distance between herself and her story, he wouldn’t ask her not to. “Geoffrey had left,” he prodded when she didn’t continue. “How did you live in London all by yourself? Did he send you money?”

“Occasionally. How did I live? Not very well. He’d left me in a flat in Holborn with one surly servant and no friends. At first I naturally gravitated toward the London art set, but that soon became awkward.”

“Why?”

“Because the men wanted to seduce me and the women—not coincidentally—didn’t trust me. I was weary of their self-absorption anyway; I had only drifted into that world out of inertia.”

“What did you do with yourself?” He poured more wine into her glass and handed it to her.

“My main preoccupation was trying to find enough money to pay the rent. I tried painting, but as I’ve already told you, I didn’t have enough talent. I started a biography of my father, but couldn’t find anyone interested in publishing it. I—” she heaved a sigh, as if she were already tired “—wrote a few little memoirs, ‘Life with My Father in Provence,’ that sort of thing, and sometimes people even bought them and paid me for them. I kept a journal, a diary—still do, in fact.”

“What about Geoffrey’s father? Wouldn’t he help you?”

She looked at him rather pityingly. “You knew him better than I, Christy. What do you think?”

“Did you ask him?”

“Yes, once. His written reply was a very short, very blunt refusal. In essence, he advised me not to darken his door again. I’d made my bed, et cetera.” She took a sip of wine and set the glass down with a little clatter, her movements stiff from old anger.

“So you were on your own.”

“Quite.”

“And yet you didn’t take a lover?”

She raised her eyebrows at that. “No, I’ve told you.”

“Well, forgive me for saying so, darling, but that doesn’t sound very sophisticated to me. That sounds—why, that almost sounds
provincial
to me.”

She rolled her eyes, trying not to laugh. “I can see I’m not going to live that down for a long, long time.”

“No, but I’d have thought a true Continental sophisticate like you would have taken lovers while her husband was away. But you didn’t.”

“I could have,” she said defensively.

“I’m quite sure of that.”

“I was invited to do so more than once.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Certainly not because I thought it was morally wrong.”

“Certainly not.”

She sighed again. “Oh, Christy, I don’t know. Lack of energy? I’d been betrayed. Geoffrey hurt me very badly.”

He picked up her hand and began to trace its outline against the coverlet on his raised thigh. “Wouldn’t that be all the more reason to have an affair? A kind of revenge?”

“I thought of it.”

“But you didn’t,” he persisted.

She hesitated. “There was a man.” Another pause. “Two men, in fact.”

Immediately he was sorry he’d raised the subject. “You know, Anne, maybe I don’t need to know this after all.”

“Oh, no, you asked me, and now you’re going to have all of it, the whole sordid story.” But she squeezed his thigh, telling him it wasn’t going to be that sordid. “There was a man, an old friend of my father’s. I’d known him most of my life; I thought of him almost as an uncle. When Geoffrey left me, I went to him for advice. He gave me money immediately—a hundred pounds, I think it was. Well—I daresay you’re ahead of me already in this story—it wasn’t long before it became clear that this was not precisely a loan. Or I should say, he wasn’t interested in being paid back
in kind
; he had a different
tender
in mind, so to speak.” The brittle tone was back, barely veiling the bitterness underneath. “That hurt me. It felt like another betrayal. After that, I was leery of helpful-seeming men. I stayed to myself. I got a cat,” she said with a short laugh. “I formed friendships with women in my neighborhood—most of them in remarkably similar circumstances—and we helped each other whenever we could. And Geoffrey did send money occasionally. The time passed. Then he came home. He was ill and—”

“Wait.” He kept his gaze on her fingers, bending them backward and forward, pretending absorption in their amazing flexibility. “I believe you forgot the second man.”

“Ah. That was nothing. Really.”

“The whole sordid story,” he reminded her softly.

“All right, then. I was half in love with him,” she said, speaking quickly. “He was a sculptor. My marriage was an impediment at first; but then, as it became more and more impossible—I didn’t even know where Geoffrey was, or if I’d ever see him again—I came close to acquiescing in an affair with this man. I didn’t, though, and the relationship ended. About which I certainly have no regrets now.” She took her hand back and faced him. “Something held me back, Christy. I didn’t know what it was—I thought perhaps I was a cold woman, incapable of giving myself in that way. But it’s not true, and I know now why I couldn’t take him for my lover.”